far too easy to game a system like that and just because someone makes good posts doesn’t mean they want to be saddled with the burden modding. You said yourself its a difficult and thankless job. How about the community just votes on mods who volunteer and allow an option for a recall vote?

I’m sympathetic to this post and surprised by the massive downvotes… But it sounds like a great deal of work for a questionably better result.

“Whoever is arbitrarily in charge of a community has full unrestricted power to do whatever they want”

So you want to kick out whoever build the community and be in charge with others likeminded people?

All popular community’s would be taken over by groups, bots, data centers, big tech … And used will be brainwashed. Your vote wouldn’t matter at all.

You vote with leaving a community and / or the platform.

Thank god you’re not the one running it because holy shit, these are some awful takes.

So if I create a community and spend my time curating it, it should be taken from me if someone posts a meme and gets up votes?

Usually people who complain about mods are a problem. In face lemmy has lazy mods. We need stronger enforcement in some of these communities so they can thrive

Its not that big of a deal. Mods do have power to influence and control a community but I don’t think average users care enough to engage in this discussion required to do community governance.

Its hard enough trying to get people to give a fuck about voting for the leader of their country theres no chance they will care about electing a mod for a Lemmy community.

You’ve got instance Admins who can remove mods if there is to much of an issue. You can easily start a community with the same name. We have reasons why this won’t be as much of a problem as on reddit.

You clearly don’t understand what a thankless job being a mod is. You’re subjected to relentless harassment from anyone you try to moderate. Its not really a job that anyone wants. Mods are volunteers who just want to improve their communities. You may disagree with their policies and enforcement, and you have the right to move to or create a new community. Having elections would just ensure that there’s no one at all to moderate them.

mods are elected by the users who generate the highest upvoted content in a community.

So, your solution is… cronyism? Because this just sounds like creating a special class of power-player users and a smoke screen for them.

upvotes are not representative of quality, or ethics.

I think the federated nature of things will shake this out, if admins/mods (there seems to be some confusion about which term to use) get too nuts. Reddit has a legendary shithead Mod on the main Grateful Dead sub, but there’s an alternate GD sub where a group that is smaller, but sufficient to form a community, gathers.

In the case of here, someone can start a community with the same name on a different Instance, and just like those two Dead subs, it’s not a one or the other proposition for users, they can sub both or either. People will gravitate to the community with the best moderation that creates the best discourse.

Bottom line, this place is in a lot less danger from the problem you describe than Reddit. There are built-in pressure valves, seems to me.

Don’t like the mods at World?

That’s admins not moderators. Admins are for instances, moderators are for communities.

Go make your own Lemmy, with blackjack and hookers. But that’s not sufficient. It takes years to build up a community to have enough people for meaningful discussion to happen, and nearly all communities or instances fail.

Define “fail”? Niche communities will have a limited audience of course, but if the moderators of a big community suck then people will move.

Elections should happen on a schedule and, if a community is particularly upset with a mod, a vote of no confidence can be taken.

Voting is really not much different from moving to a different community. Vote with your feet.

You should probably familiarize yourself with the concept of plurality…

upvotes are way too easy too manipulate on fedi so if you really want democratic elections you would need a better system. but lets just keep it simple

Thank you for sharing.

I disagree with the problem hence with the solution. Because Lemmy isn’t centralised the bigger instances are more into a oligopoly situation that in a monopoly. Therefore it is not easy but definitly doable to move a community from one instance to the other to free our selves from the mods. Of course, we cannt be sure without an example. If anyone think of some case, I’m listening.

You also seems to simply the way moderation acts. Moderation happened at the instance level and the community level and not only is the rule inforces by a different team (or single overworked moderator) when you switch community or instances but the set of rule is different.

But that’s not sufficient. It takes years to build up a community to have enough people for meaningful discussion to happen

It literally takes as few as 2 people to have a meaningful discussion, so the idea it needs to be some kind of massively large site is already a false premise.